


lives darkly in my body

by aMassiveDisappointment (BadOldWest)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Jyn asks Cassian to be her sperm donor, Pining, Pregnancy, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 00:40:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11817591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/aMassiveDisappointment
Summary: He understands her loss for words. In the months since the rebellion, he had been eager to move on, find a new life for himself. But a baby? For Jyn?She closes her eyes. “I just…picture a baby on my lap. I have for a long time. It helps me calm down. It’s like it centers me. I don’t know why. And it’s like, every time I rest my mind, there’s this child on my lap.”“Yes,” he sets down the tools in his hands, wiping the oil off on the back of his trousers, “But why are you asking me?”She covers her mouth with her hand. There’s a grimace on her face.“I joked about it to Leia, and she said…” Jyn rolls her eyes heavenward. “She got really excited and said ‘your babies would look like sunshine’. I could see it.”Cassian sighs, staring at the table. When he looks up, Jyn’s face is miserable and flushed red. He takes her hand.How can he say no. How can he say “I can’t do this, because I want to this with you.”





	lives darkly in my body

**Author's Note:**

> I should probably point out, because there's already been comments about how fucking weird this story is: this was a prompt where Jyn wants a baby and asks Cassian to help, and I really didn't want to do it at the time, until I realized I could make it sad as fuck, so that's how this story was made.

_“Jyn, why?”_

She flushes, staring at the oil-slicked floor of the shop.

He watches her fidget, wants to put her out of her misery. But he has to have this one question answered; the one thing he will ask for himself.

“I just… don’t want to look for a relationship right now. And I want this for _myself._ I don’t think I’m suited to having a partner and a child; just one. I can only handle one, Cassian. I’d rather have the kid.”

It’s not a rejection. He hasn’t brought the subject of that person, that relationship, being with him.

He hasn’t even offered the idea to her. And she doesn’t want any ideas.

It’s not a rejection, but it feels like one.

He understands her loss for words. In the months since the rebellion, he had been eager to move on, find a new life for himself. But a baby? For Jyn?

She closes her eyes. “I just…picture a baby on my lap. I have for a long time. It helps me calm down. It’s like it centers me. I don’t know why. And it’s like, every time I rest my mind, there’s this child on my lap.”

“Yes,” he sets down the tools in his hands, wiping the oil off on the back of his trousers, _“But why are you asking me?”_

She covers her mouth with her hand. There’s a grimace on her face.

“I joked about it to Leia, and she said…” Jyn rolls her eyes heavenward. “She got really excited and said ‘your babies would look like sunshine’. I could see it.”

Cassian sighs, staring at the table. When he looks up, Jyn’s face is miserable and flushed red. He takes her hand.

How can he say no. How can he say “I can’t do this, because I want to this _with you.”_

She can do it for herself. She can ask someone else. She can wait a few years and find someone else and be able to do both.

She wants this and she wants now and she wants it from him.

He’s a child of the war, and takes what he can get when he can get it.

So he does the hardest thing. Lets her start her life, post-rebellion, without starting it how he wants it to.

“Jyn, _of course I will.”_

The hardest part was he could see it too.

 

They talk about it like it’s an affair, slipping into each other’s rooms in the dead of night and whispering, stone-faced, about when they should wait until and the right time for her to be fertile and every else about pregnancy.

They’re on the same page about pregnancy. The conception and gestation and birth on a biological scale. Breeding, is all it is. At this point, he has the intricacies of her ovulation cycle committed to memory better than she does, and for their lack of boundaries, neither comments on it and just uses the information and his expertise between the two of them.

It’s everything that comes after that’s not well thought out.

There’s a logistical problem about him being the father; she doesn’t want anyone to know. Which means there’s a clinical level of self-protection that gets removed.

“I don’t want records. I don’t want there to be all this data to tie this together, would you want that? Someone in your life ten years from now doing some research finding out you had a child with someone else?”

Ten years from now, he’d rather everyone know he had a child. This was _insanity._ But Jyn was having a hard time with her grief, there was a lean amount of patience left under her usual tenacity, and if this one, fresh start was all he could give her...

They’d figure it out.

He rubs the back of his head, “What’s the alternative, Jyn?”

“Med Droids are so judgemental,” she continues, biting her nails. He takes a deep breath. _“Jyn, how else are we going to do this?”_

Her eyes flicker up at him, guilty. “I...I don’t know.”

Suggesting the old fashioned way could make him lose her forever.

He sighs again, placing a hand on her shoulder “I’ll get us a transfer pipette from the medbay. But that means it’s all got to happen at once, okay? I highly doubt anything in your bunk is staying sterile for long.”

He’s relieved when she laughs.

“‘Sterile’ isn’t a word I want to hear right now,” she whines, nuzzling his chest when he pulls her against it. He rests his chin on the top of her head. If she’s laughing, his soul lightens, and he tilts his face towards her bent head, because she can’t see, and folds himself closer to her. Like they’re a part of something together. If only for a moment.

Maybe that’s why he agreed. That they will be a part of something together, something living and breathing with eyelashes and hands and looks like sunshine.

Leia’s words, even secondhand, have never left his head.

 _She’s not thinking,_ he finally realizes, _at least, not about anything beyond this. She’ll choose this over me, is what I need to learn._

 

The _transfer_ is painless. He went to the medbay and hardened his face to further questions. Transfer pipette with a large bulb and long tube. No, he did not need to disclose what it was for.

A flush only collected on his face when it was clutched, in a sanitary bag, in his fist under his jacket. He went straight to Jyn’s room.

The orgasm alone before her turn is hard-earned, hidden behind her ‘fresher door, while she tries to wait as politely as possible outside. It’s nearly impossible not to picture Jyn, so he accepts this with shame. It does a greater deal to harden him, the image of her with his child in her belly, than the pornography holograms she suggested.

He accidentally meets his own eyes in the mirror. They judge him. It sets him back from his goal by a number of minutes.

But when his seed is drawn into the pipette, she is allowed to enter, and he prepares to leave. She starts to shimmy out of her pants.

“Can you just...?”

He pauses at the door. She’s already seated on the floor, covering her lap with her sleep-shirt over her thighs. The thing that might be a baby is propped up in a clean cup on her sink.

“Can you…stay here, and laugh if I mess up?”

He settles himself on the floor across from her, morbidly curious and glad to feel wanted. He keeps his eyes averted, but her every movement pricks his senses.

It’s the animal pride of a neutered dog.

She pulls her underwear to the side, somehow thinking she needed them on as some sense of security.

His hand rubs her knee as she angles the tube of the pipette, cringing her face up awkwardly.

“I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head, watching the full bulb of the pipette in her hand carefully.

He doesn’t know it, but she’s never adored him more than she does in that moment.

“Nothing to be sorry for.”

There’s something about the position of it that now seems to make sense to her. She stops fidgeting and her hands stills in adjusting the tube.

“Ask the force for a baby,” she hisses, and there’s an odd sound, and she cringes as the temperature of his body, slightly cooled in the time this has taken, fills her.

It’s unpleasant, it’s an unpleasant thing for a greater end, and Cassian’s nostrils flare with concern.

She lets out a nervous sound, and he lifts his eyes to her face. He’d been staring at her belly before that.

“Are you alright?”

“I just...what if I didn’t do it right?”

He takes her shaking hand with a calm one. This was her idea. Her decision. He’s just much better and getting them through it.

“Then we try again.”

She finally looks at him.

“I don’t want to ask you to-”

He shakes his head once more. “You should be lying down.”

She looks down at her lap. “I’m scared if I stand, it’ll…”

He’s at her side, one hand at her knee and the other the back of her neck. “Lie down.”

She does, and he lifts, raising her knees draped over his arms to try and keep his seed from trickling down her thigh. It hits her, with immense force, what they’ve just done. _What if it did work._

“I don’t want to ask you to do this again,” she murmurs as he lays her down on her bed. As careful as he was, her thighs are still wet from moving her, and she shudders.

This is not how he picture his cum inside her, the few times he ever risked it, the few times his longing got him to the point of an image of an afterglow.

He grabs a towel, dots it against her thighs.

He shrugs, taking a chair beside her. This is the easy kind of talking, the convincing each other to try again.

He leans forward to wedge a pillow under her hips.

“You didn’t ask me for just _this._ You asked me to help you get pregnant. That’s what I agreed to; so until you’re pregnant, you’ll get what you need from me, if you want it.”

Her hand catches his shoulder, squeezing.

“This is why I wanted _your_ baby, Cassian,” she smiles up at him. “I need half of you to balance out the half of me.”

The transfer is painless, but there is something gone, and once it’s gone comes the hard part.

 

Cassian might have gotten her pregnant. It hits her before the first bite of every meal. Even though it’s too early to check yet. It’s when the transience of her day ceases, she’s got her tray and she’s at a table and work at creating a new alliance over the liberated galaxy is so much shakier than meticulous military planning. She pulls up her food for the first bite and it’s the only time she’s awake and still enough for-

_I may be pregnant._

He was swimming inside her, formulating cells. She now begins to fear the stretch of her belly, the weight and the discomfort and the inability to hide. And birth.

Cassian can’t be there for the birth because to everyone else -Cassian isn’t the father-

She closes her eyes, can’t eat. She needs to wait one more week until she takes a blood test.

Her heart surges. Maybe she needs him, more than she was willing to admit. Maybe she was being selfish. Maybe she never even gave him a chance.

She doesn’t want a relationship. But would Cassian be the relationship she pictured? Getting to know each other and forced smiles and trying to tiptoe on how much the war had damaged them? Flinging that pain off and trying to wipe it clean with a new life, new baby?

She asked Cassian because she was ready. She trusted him. Knew him enough that she wouldn’t resent a thing about that baby if it had even a little of him.

She went off birth control months ago, they planned it out. She didn’t see herself on base after four months, so conception was ideal for this time so she could leave before anyone noticed.

He almost flew into a rage when he found out she was still on the roster for scouting missions. Came into her room and went off on her, for how risky it was, and that she could do serious damage to-

She didn't let him go further. He made her sick, and guilty, and did the very thing she had not asked from him. 

She reminded him, in a dangerous tone, that they didn't know anything yet, and it was not like she was nine months along even if she was, and to stay out of her affairs.

It’s not Leia’s sweet, stolen moment of happy hypothetical; _your babies would look like sunshine._

She probably meant babies _years away from now_ . A game. Jyn could have said Bodhi or Luke or even Chewie, but she said Cassian, and Leia’s eyes lit up, and Jyn words sunk back inside her with a moment of _oh._

She did want that half him half her, wanted it like a moment of clarity opened up at Leia’s excitement.

Fear fills her.

Maybe if she isn’t, she won’t ask for this again.

But if she is.

Disappointment flares through her.

_She wants to be._

 

It’s been over two months since the…time a pregnancy would have taken place, he can’t call it anything other than what it was. And it was a clinical, life-creating process.

One they do not talk about. And Jyn…

  
Hasn’t said a word.

  
She acts like all is normal, comfortingly patting his arm in passing, talking to him when they have a moment; both trying to fit into their new lives with positions secured in a more structured Alliance.

It leaves him irate, though to expect more would mean he misunderstood their bargain, which he did not. Jyn wanted her baby to share his genes. She didn’t owe him an explanation of her stance on the topic if it went well or if it failed.

  
So when Rogue One decides to go out to get a drink, like any night before a well-deserved day off, he feels as strung up as he does every time he sees her; no accomplished look of excitement on her face to know that their efforts…took, per say. There’s no hand smoothing maternally down her own belly, no glow, no proud smile. So he assumes they failed, or she changed her mind, or just let it go.

  
Over drinks, when he sees her at the bar ordering for everyone, a chore she’s always tried to slide into his lap, he barely notes the difference. Until she’s sipping what looks very much like juice. Just juice.

  
Jyn is hardly a lush, but she likes a good night out. Likes to be rowdy in a contained space with many friends to look out for her. Likes to let go, when she knows Cassian will probably end up catching her and holding back her hair when all comes rushing back up.

  
He watches her pull from the juice -a quite healthy one at that, very little sugar- he loses his breath. Because for her….

  
He stomachs the ache in himself, pulling long sips from his drink when someone makes eye contact with him, as though they expect him to speak, want him to speak, like he normally would. Usually after Jyn says something. He’s quiet, because he can’t, not when there’s this chance at life swirling into molecular form in Jyn’s belly, half his life and half hers.

  
There’s a moment of pure affection that he knows that she’s making choices to take care of their baby.

  
Her baby. It’s hers. He can’t take that from her.

  
Jyn catches his eye as Chirrut tells a story (with Baze making corrections for accuracy). Are you okay? she mouths, her eyes concerned.

  
The way her face pales when he looks back tells him all he needs to know; she knows her knows.

  
She leans back in her seat, sighing. “I’m beat.”

  
“You’ve had one drink,” Bodhi laughs, probably assuming it wasn’t just juice in her glass. She looks uncomfortable.

  
Smoothly, Cassian lifts her glass from across the table, sniffing it, cringing, and then draining all evidence through the straw. “Kriff, Erso. This is rocket fuel.”

  
She shoots him a thankful look, a guilty one, because she doesn’t deserve him bailing her out right now. He nods back. “Let me help you to your room.”

  
She nods. For dramatic effect, he slings one of her arms over his shoulders, and she leans into it, accepting. Once they’ve said their goodbyes, they walk to her bunk in silence. Their arms switch positions, it’s him who slings one over her shoulders now, bosoming her to his side like his best card.

In silence, he remembers the image of her from earlier this week; dangling from the rafters. She was being careless. She could have hurt the baby...

 _It's her body,_ he reminds himself. Her baby.

  
She won’t leave it. Won’t pull away. He searches for the right thing to say, but there is none. So he goes for the obvious one;

  
“When were you ever going to tell me?”

  
“Did I need to?” she replies flatly.

  
He nods stiffly. She sighs, resting her brow on his shoulder as he leads her feet.

  
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s so early, Cass, I don’t want something bad to happen like it usually does when you’ve only just got a moment to be happy about it. I wanted just a little time to be sure.”

  
“You don’t have to protect me. I can be in this with you. Not just someone who’d be excited for you from a distance.”

  
She grabs him by the arm before she closes the door;

  
“The story is that over a month ago, we got drinks together. You left before me, and I got drunk and went home with someone. I won’t remember his name when asked. That’s the story.”

  
He nods at her.

That’s the story. That’s what she wants.

“How’s the morning sickness?” he asks.

  
She sighs, her eyes softening. “Not good. I hate it.”

  
He steps into her room. The door whishes shut. She raises her eyebrows. “Didn’t you already get me pregnant?”

  
He looks at the floor.

  
“I…I’ve helped you with hangovers. I can be here to help you with morning sickness. Can’t I?”

  
He’s crashed in her room before on drunken nights, even shared her bed, as a precaution for the violent mornings where her vices caught her by the stomach and throat. Took care of her through them all.

  
Jyn looks conflicted, because this offer shouldn’t be making it harder, but there are unspoken reasons why it is.

  
“Some asshole got you pregnant,” he tries to laugh, “And this is what I’m going to be doing about it. If you’ll let me.”

  
Jyn’s face is stricken, he’s not sure why, almost leaves, until she catches his hand.

  
“Stay,” she whispers, and he gathers her in his arms.

  
“You’re going to be a mother.”

  
She laughs, a sob overtaking her, every possible emotion in one.

  
“I haven’t heard it out loud before.”

  
Her joy over being a mother completely overtakes her denial of him as the father. For a little while, at least.

  
Maybe, if the story is that he isn’t the father, he can stay close without contradicting it. That she can remember his name, but chooses not to.

  
Maybe, he’s trying to soften the thing on his tongue that is so hard to swallow.

 

In the night, her body drifts to his. She wakes with another massive pain in her back, which have just started as part of her nightly routine, and whines before she thinks the better of it. Cassian stirs beside her. Flinches.

His hand is between her thighs, squeezed there in the grip her legs made above her knees.

She rolls onto her back as he yanks it free, both of them breathless.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “It’s the hormones. It’s like this baby wants to suck a twin up in there with it.”

He laughs away the awkwardness, trying to indicate the proximity is nothing he can’t handle. It is.

She swallows, he can hear her catch her breath.

“Are you okay?”

“Back pain.”

Her teeth are gritted.

He’s felt so gutted about this whole thing, but the image of her, throwing up and in pain and losing the familiarity of her own body…

This isn’t about him anymore.

“Do you need me to leave you-”

“No,” she shakes her head. He can’t see it, but it stirs the pillow in the darkness. He’s stayed in her bed through nightmares, through heavy intoxication, through the need to just feel skin against hers, platonically, non-judgmentally. He’s woken up aroused, and so has she, and they chalk it up to the sexy devil they sleep beside, laugh at the chagrin of rebellion teens who would never believe they’d wasted the heat between the legs of the other.

 _This_ can’t be what ruins it.

“Do you need…?”

She turns her head to look at him, only sensed by the rustle on the pillowcase in the darkness.

“What?”

He creeps closer.

“What do you need?” he changes course, gently. “I’ll give it to you.”

Jyn’s heart shudders. He gave her the baby. Wasn’t that it? Wasn’t that what she had so cruelly asked for?

There has to be some rule, if his baby was already inside her there wasn’t anything that needed to be off-limits between their bodies.

She has to stop thinking of this baby as _his,_ it’s not like that, but she always did, and it scares her to death.

She leans forward and presses the tip of her nose to his.

“I can’t do a relationship. I can’t change what I have with you. I need it too much.”

She can feel his eyes on her, and though she can’t see the expression, she feels calmer.

“Who says it has to change?”

“What?”

His hands secure at her lower back, kneading, somehow, exactly where the pain chronically was. She almost moans, and his upper hand is earned for the first time since she pulled him into the workshop and asked him to give her a baby.

Her chin tilts back, and she feels his breath on her neck, her chest, the growing sensitivity at her breasts. Suddenly, once the tension is gone and his hands are merely stroking her loose muscles, he pulls her closer.

“Why do you say it like I want you in any way other than exactly how you are,” he whispers against her lips, and it’s not just some nightly arousal that makes her press forward, moaning, and pulling him between her legs.

His mouth slants along hers, his tongue brushing her tongue, and she lets out a soft groan because she’d dreamed about this almost every night. There’s time to be chaste, and to explore, but there’s a life inside her that’s half his, if he wants it, and they’re not tiptoeing around that anymore. It may be chemical, or hormonal, but it’s so right and it never escapes her that _it’s Cassian_ and it feels even better knowing that.

He keeps his weight off of her cautiously as they kiss.

Idly, he bends his head to kiss her collarbone, musing. “I’m in this, Jyn. I’ll do whatever you need from me, I just want to share this with you, and no one else. I’m in you, Jyn, I-”

She silences him with a nod, her hands pulling his face close. Her legs wrap around him.

“I was having heart palpitations thinking about giving birth without you there with me.”

Her in that kind of pain, alone, makes his vision white out. To think she wanted him to pretend to be the kind of father who would let her go through that. Even if the hypothetical father would, he wouldn’t. “Don’t be ridiculous. I would have knocked down walls to be at your side for that.”

He’s as meticulous and careful with her as always, his control seems a little more hard-won in his mind. He pulls away, but it’s so he gets to press his lips to the slight change to her belly, the tightening curve under her sleep shirt. She shivers.

“I don’t want to say it out loud, jinx this somehow…”

She can feel what he wants to say. It makes her hips arch towards him as he kisses her stomach.

“That’s your baby too, Cassian. If this is what you want.”

Jyn has had one instinct, plan everything like you have to do it alone. Motherhood was no exception.

But Cassian has been her partner for years, so maybe not being able to picture this step without him was what they needed…

“What’s going to change?” she blurts out, gasping up at the ceiling.

He shakes his head.

“Nothing if you trust me. You knew how this was going to go for the next few months. Even if someone else got you pregnant. I wouldn’t be able to stay away. I’d take care of you. The only thing that changes is when you wake up at night and need this,” he swipes a thumb at her wetness, and she sighs, her worries dissipating, “I can touch you. If you want.”

“Yes,” she combs her fingers through his hair. She didn’t think she could have him, and herself, and half him half her, but wasn’t that what they’ve always been?

He loses some of that control, gripping her hips, pressing his brow to the taut skin, grinding himself into the mattress. She’s watching him writhe with his own arousal, not just the dutiful kind he was giving her before. It makes her lose her breath to see him this way.

Of course she wanted _this_ to happen. She just put her cards in to settle for less before they even began.

He lifts her hips, drawing her sleeping pants down her legs and tossing them aside. His mouth dips to taste her. She arches into him, a moan choking out of her. Her hand was really not cutting it anymore for these waves of desire in the middle of the night, it was like her body craved his in some bizarre way. The giver of this child. It was driving her insane that her body knew so fully, planting images of those sunshine-looking children in the grass of Lah’mu, in her arms, and his eyes on her face when she held his child. This was so beyond how she had seen herself for years, and yet-

His tongue is working fast against her, longing, impatience beating skill because he wants her to get off _fast_ after all the wasted time. This isn’t the place for sentimentality, not yet. She grabs one of the hands holding her thighs open, drawing it to a breast, knowing the recent increased sensitivity was going to…

They’re fuller in his hand than the glimpses he’s gotten before have implied, and he lets his hand twitch against the way she fills in and then treats himself to a rich, slow _squeeze._

A noise cracks out of her throat, her hips bucking against his mouth. They become a tangle of his-and-hers in relation to each other. His free arm bands over her hips as he plucks at one of her stiff nipples. Her eyes are squeezed shut and she yanks at his hair roughly. He takes it with patience, whispering against her cunt as she shudders and sighs.

It’s fast, because they’re both ready hopelessly ready but always a little too stupid to start when it came to each other.

“Come up here,” she whines when she’s been satisfied, though not nearly enough, “fuck me.”

He lifts his head, dutifully kissing her thighs once more. “Are you sure?”

“Cassian, what’s the worst that can happen, are you going to get me pregnant?”

She laughs as he crawls up her body. To his surprise, she flips him on his back.

“Holding my legs open was starting to hurt,” she admits, pulling his shirt open with a coy smile. He starts to apologize, but she bends to kiss him instead. Aches came easier with the slow shift in weight at her torso. In this position he can slide his hands up the flare of her hips, see her breasts sway over him, the length of her upright body as she straddles him. His hands find her strong thighs, stroking up and down, and she shivers. She lifts her shirt over her head, grinding down on him.

“It’s not just the hormones,” she blurts out. “I want _you,_ Cassian.”

She strokes his cock, and he closes his eyes, wrapping a hand around her wrist.

There’s something in his face that doesn’t fully believe.

She touches his brow with gentle fingers, until he lifts his head and opens his eyes.

“Hey,” her hand smoothes down his temple, “it’s you, Cassian. I was being stupid and thought I couldn’t have both. I was an idiot-”

He shakes his head, kissing her. Grinding up into her. Already expertly turning her body’s needs for him against her. How wicked of him. She’d feel fully seduced if she wasn’t already carrying his baby.

She’s wet from his clever tongue, and her hand reaches between them to tease her swollen lips with his cock. She shudders. He loves watching her shake above him, pinned to the pillows, aching for her and getting all of her in one moment.

She slides him inside, and her head falls back breathlessly, and his vision practically whites out.

“Cassian-I…”

He shushes her, running a hand up and down her thigh. “Shh. This is about what you need. Just use me, Jyn.”

Jyn obeys. She pulls him to sit up, and riding him with the leverage of his shoulders is a lot easier _-and more fun._

 _“What about you,”_ she whines, _“I want this to be for you too.”_

She tucks her face in his shoulder, grateful for his guiding hands at her lower back as she grinds on his cock. She feels the breath of his quiet laugh against her shoulder.

He pulls a plump breast into his mouth, glancing up at her, bouncing her with a jerk of his thighs. She gasps, scrambling for purchase.

“Just use me now Jyn, because I fully intend to get you on your hands and knees after this.”

 

In a way, it’s the real consummation, or conception, or whatever it is. They don’t think about the transfer in her fresher two months before. This was where it started.

They try to keep it private; the afterglow and excitement and the house on Lah’mu that he insists on buying them with his rebellion earnings.

He stops drinking before she _openly_ stops drinking, pretending that juice is something stronger, so he takes the brunt of the questioning so she can transition with a “that actually sounds like a good idea, Cassian,” and follows suit (for a much better reason than his simple shrug given).

They leave the bar together, perfectly sober, and she tucks her hand in his elbow and bends towards him to whisper “And they say chivalry is dead.”

Maybe it’s because he’s the father, maybe it’s because he’s Cassian, but her body craves his. The changes to her body don’t seem to bother him. If anything, the blast of hormones, the unpredictable curves, the sleepless nights; these are dualistically things war has braced him for and hope has made him wish for. She turns him into a mess whenever she mentions their baby, _his baby_ when she’s feeling particularly generous, or wants to see him melt to her mercy under her hands.

They try to keep it private, but the instant she’s showing everyone knows from the way he hovers over her shoulder that he’s the father. As if they could hide that. As if it could be anyone else.

Leia is _thrilled_ for them, wanting partial credit for the conception of this human, perhaps a name in her honor. Cassian rolls his eyes, tucking Jyn under his arm as she grumbles that _she’s not made of glass;_ instead whispering stars, whispering goddesses, whispering heros that he was hoping to name the baby.

His hope is shy and tentative and beautiful, and she breathes it in, draws it down her throat, and holds it in her belly; where she wishes it would wrap around their baby like a blanket.

She sees it clearly again. Sees it when he presses reverent kiss after reverent kiss to her growing belly, sining songs to it and kissing her lips afterwards to remind her that he never forgets that she's there too.

Like the choice that led her to this.

Star, goddess, hero; this baby will be half him half her and look like sunshine.

  


 

**Author's Note:**

> So...there was some insemination stuff that knocked five years off my life. There's only so many ways you can get around saying "Turkey Baster"


End file.
